Welcome Back Roback

First, I know it’s been a while since my last post, but I have been working hard on Ph.D. student exam stuff and getting used to working in diverse development environments (including my new Ubuntu Linux operating system on my home computer). Figuring out a way to compose across PC/Mac/Linux operating systems while retaining rich text formatting and not creating a Frankenstein monster of a document has been a challenge (I think I have it solved with LaTeX, but that is another post).

I finally imported my old Blogger posts to this site and updated the scheme (though the CSS could be better–project for later). I have watched so many fun films and read a lot of books this year that I am way behind on writing about, but I’m also hoping to improve / expand this blog with descriptions of what I am working on and researching.

Today I applied for a conference at Loyola University to discuss and give a demonstration about using technology in the classroom. Right now, the panel session will cover community, customization, and collaborative writing in the classroom. The technologies I plan to talk about include Moodle, WikkaWiki (which at least two of my profs. at IIT use in their courses), phpBB (where I will demonstrate the course evaluation site that my teammates and I developed last semester), as well as good ol’ Google docs and typewith.me. Additionally, I plan to show off the Research Paper Toolbox that a dream team of tech comm students and I developed last year.

If anyone knows of other free or open source technologies that I am leaving out that relate to collaborative writing, please let me know, though I’m not sure how long the panel session will last…

I observed the Moodle.org development community for a long time, and set up an installation last year, but I definitely need to do a lot of work to have a live site by the conference (August, 2011). I’m hoping to use Moodle for my 100-level course next semester and WikkaWiki for my 300 level course on graphic novels. It’s probably insane to try to use two new course management apps that I have no experience administering in the same semester, but I’m sort of out of my mind like that. I plan to blog about my successes and failures and I will try to blog about the technology in education presentation (provided my fellow panelist and I are accepted).

My new blog site

Due to frustrations with my previous blog site, I will be moving my old blog entries here where I will blog about a variety of research and entertainment related issues (don’t worry, I will still write about films!).

Ken Burns’ “The Civil War”: Parts 6-9

Dir. Ken Burns, Est. 360 min., on PBS

So last time, I said I would talk about the film’s best and worst aspects.

Best:

  • Stirring Letters

    • Letters from persons in the war to their families, especially Sullivan Ballou’s letter to his wife, are tear wrenching.

  • Fabulous historical details

    • Among my favorite: Abraham Lincoln handing out presidential appointments after the 1860 election and saying there are not enough tits on the pig to feed the piglets

  • The impressive array of photos

    • Whoever did the job of assembling images is to be commended, as there are hundreds, if not thousands, of stunning images compiled in this film.

Worst:

  • The range of voice actors

    • With the budget of this film, the number of actors included could have potentially been expanded. Morgan Freeman and Garrison Keeler were forced to do triple duty in some episodes.

  • The soundtrack

    • Viewed with intervals between episodes, “Ashokan Farewell,” the title track and outro music, would be charming and unique. Viewed in sequence without breaks, it looses its effect after the sixth time, and becomes annoying after the sixteenth time. A sad truth for a beautiful composition.

  • The Ken Burn’s Effect

    • I know I lauded it in the last review, but it does become a tiresome, predictable strategy, especially in the instances when photographs are reused (in the cases of the major players).

The conclusion was somewhat bittersweet, and from a historical point of view, focused entirely too much on the great men of history and all but forgot the former slaves. The resolution and much of the introductory portions of the episodes focused on reunion filmstrips and newsreels. While this is fascinating video, the question is justifiably raised: where is the discussion of race and the inequities that persist until our present day.

I’ll stand in the camp that this film can’t be all things to all people and shouldn’t try to treat every aspect of the war, but it still has some notable gaps and omissions.

However, I feel that much can be excused by the fact that this film serves as a progenitor of many modern documentary series. A good question is raised as to whether a film of this length should be expected to address all aspects of an issue; I would argue no. The discretion of the filmmaker is to set the scope, but a justification should be present to defend the scope (in my opinion). We are rarely privileged to enjoy such a justification, and this is no exception.

As a historical primer and stirring film, this film has great merit. For those who argue comprehensiveness of large historical film tomes such as this, I think that this serves as a relic of what was once considered the comprehensive treatment of a subject.

Film (or television miniseries in this case) is no longer king for a treatment of such a large topic. For Burns’ upcoming Vietnam war documentary, I hope for much more than a one dimensional approach: utilize the advances in technology to put your message in a more comprehensive domain. Granted this was not possible for this film, but hopefully Burns will advance with the times and deliver his masterpiece in his next work, as this film does not do justice to the potential that he possesses as a filmmaker and “compendiumist” (or whatever word you will use for that function, I couldn’t find a better one at this time of night).

8/10

Hannah (2011)

Dir. Joe Wright, 111 min., in theaters

I have to admit that having missed out on Atonement (2007), I don’t have too much of a basis for critiquing the style of Joe Wright’s films (the only other one I’ve seen being his 2005 Pride and Prejudice). However, after this film, I can say that whatever his style is, I like it.

Hannah (Saoirse Ronan), the daughter of Erik (Eric Bana) is stalked by Erik’s former handler, Marissa (Cate Blanchett). And that is about it in terms of plot. Sure there are typical spy developments on who is related to whom and how, but mostly it is just a great chase thriller where the only thing we need to know is that the spymaster wants the rouge agent and his daughter dead.

Spy films in general have too many characters. I was just talking to my students the other day about the minimalist aesthetic, and I think this is a genre that benefits from a few well developed characters. Certainly late act introductions and long screen absences make the plot harder to follow, but they also water down characters and make for a less interesting film.  No problems with that issue here, as the few supporting characters fill their temporary niches well and then disappear.

Marissa’s character is especially strong in this film, given that she could have easily been swallowed up by Ronan’s performance. Cate Blanchett channels a combination of the cold ambition of Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton (2007), the personal eccentricities of an assassin exemplified by Javier Bardem from No Country for Old Men (2007), and the southern accent of Kira Sedgwick from The Closer (or maybe Jodie Foster from The Silence of the Lambs, but more gutsy).

The film in general reminded my wife and I of Run Lola Run (1998), probably because of the strong female protagonist, but also due to the dance club soundtrack that permeates the film. As nice as this film is to look at, the aural experience is even better. The sound editing was excellent in both the effects department and the soundtrack. I don’t recall hearing a single 1970’s classic rock hit, which always makes me a happy camper.

Ronan cuts a striking figure as a dangerous girl killer who flashes into moments of adolescent innocence and awkwardness. Her range in this film was impressive, and I now want to see Atonement (2007) all the more for her Academy Award nominated performance.

For every really bad spy film I sit through, there is at least one redeeming entry in the genre which keeps me coming back for more, and this film certainly falls into this category. I almost feel like it makes up for the terrible disappointment of Salt (2010), my last summer film from last year.

8/10

Ken Burns’ “The Civil War”: Parts 1-5

Dir. Ken Burns, Est. 360 min., on PBS

Finding free copies of PBS documentaries, especially the crown jewels of their pledge drive monarchy, is like searching for a needle in a computer virus filled haystack.

Hence, when The Civil War aired in it’s entirety over the last week, I fired up my TiVo and prepared to journey back to the time when documentary filmmaking was not for the masses, but for hypernerds and PBS tote-bag-sporting intellectuals.

Documentaries are as old as film, but we live in an era when documentaries enjoy commercial success on par with other major studio releases [citation needed]. Ken Burns was a rock star in the 1990’s, only he had worse hair and played his shows over several multi-hour parts in the early evening, on public television, with sepia colored photographs and somber piano music.

The Civil War is a daunting proposition to most documentary lovers because of the length and the fact that it was originally conceived of and aired as a television mini-series. The subject matter, as I was discussing with a colleague the other day, is probably easier to swallow than some other Ken Burns fare: Jazz (2001), Baseball (1994), and the almost disturbingly boring sounding The National Parks: America’s Best Idea (2009).

Before I get down to discussing this film, let me talk a bit about what I like about Ken Burns. The man does not give anything a half-assed treatment. Case in point, The Vietnam War, his next project, is not scheduled for release until 2016. In an age where we are patronized by filmmakers telling us that we will learn what we need to know about any given topic in a lean 100 min. film that glosses over debates with 60 second sound bytes and was conceived of and produced in two years, Burns sets the gold standard for complete coverage of a topic: tell the whole story in the time it takes.

Burns’ style is now iconic: those of you owning a Mac will recognize the Ken Burns effect in Garage Band, where a partial of a photo is shown and the view gradually pans to the center or focal point (imagine looking at someone’s feet in a photo for a hard three seconds, and the view panning upwards to their face and resting for another three seconds). I’d imagine this technique is very useful for creating time for narration voiceover; hence, a short anecdote can be read in total whilst the metaphorical camera pans across the photo.

As a documentary, the film showcases the stunning photographs (and daguerreotypes/other photo precursors) that survived the civil war era largely by luck. After the war was over and the still culturally and racially fractured populace struggled to recover from the collective trauma, many photos were discarded or destroyed out of a desire to forget the war. A famous anecdote recalls finding glass photographic plates as replacement windowpanes in a country greenhouse.

Narration comes from an impressive cast of talented voice actors, including Morgan Freeman (as Frederick Douglass), (begrudgingly) Garrison Keeler, Jeremy Irons, and Sam Waterston (as Abraham Lincoln), who would go on to act in and solidify his role as the quintessential lawyer in the critically acclaimed series I’ll Fly Away.

The film is largely a compilation of quotations from an impressive range of sources with occasional interviews with historians, the most prominent being the authoritative historian on the topic, the late Shelby Foote.

Next time I’ll address some of the film’s greatest moments and a few issues I have.

Copyright Criminals (2009)

Dirs. Benjamin Franzen & Kembrew McLeod, 65 min.

I don’t claim to be a gentleman who knows much about music. In college, I kept my ear to the ground so to speak, did my share of downloading, listened to the local shows on my college radio station, etc. I even made a point of going to shows with bands I had never heard of, purchasing tickets to showcases and actually showing up for the five or six opening acts. I worked long hours affixing barcodes to disintegrating library books at $5.65/hr, but my time was not complete torture as I had my many CD’s that I lugged around all day (bad bad days at work were when I forgot headphones).

Grad school has turned me into an old man recluse who barely has time to watch the odd hockey game on TV whilst simultaneously responding to student emails. As such, I haven’t been to a show in well over two years, and about the closest I get to a showcase is my last.fm account. I wouldn’t even really know who to buy tickets to go see, unless I heard them on Sound Opinions. Likewise, grad school has left me heavily impoverished, and concert tickets no longer cost $14 with $3 beers once you get there. Going to see a band that I marginally like is financially infeasible, and seeing a band that I really want to see is usually out of my price range.

Hence, my relationship with music sadly now involves me sitting at my desk on a Saturday night, writing a blog entry on a film that discusses the legal issues of sampling. F….M….L…..

On a brighter note, Copyright Criminals is an exceptional documentary that actually provides a great deal of information about the origins and legal issues surrounding sampling. However, I highly recommend watching the film, then listening to the interview with Kembrew McLeod on Sound Opinions to get a fuller picture of the issues surrounding sampling and the music industry.

One nagging question that I have always wondered about is how artists can, in good conscience, produce something like “Come With Me” (Puff Daddy, when he was still called that) or “Wild Wild West” (Will Smith). I always assumed that large amounts of cash money payouts combined with Hollywood style hitmaking formulae were the culprit. Turns out that the complicated procedure and large financial obligations associated with clearing samples and avoiding copyright lawsuits have turned musicians into lazy, unimaginative cashgrabbers who latch onto a hook from a popular music hit, then loop it behind their tired ass rhymes. While that doesn’t excuse those songs (nothing can), it does explain a lot about why we don’t see anything inventive done by major label recording artists in the area of samples (e.g. past efforts from Beastie Boys, De la Soul, Greg Gillis, Danger Mouse).

The film itself tries to represent the opposite perspective that artists who sample are stealing from more talented artists, and I’ll give the filmmakers props for trying to show both sides. Sampling is an area where the devil’s advocate seems really out of step with the way art works. While the anti-sampling side ends up looking bad, they are allowed to voice their perspective in a way where they don’t look insane, which is refreshing for a documentary produced in the last decade. You only have to look at Michael Moore to see how documentary filmmakers tend to slam their agenda over the viewers head and use their privileged position as the final editor to make the opposition look like a bunch of fools.

8/10

As a side note, I also watched the film Chain Reaction (1996). Even though that film is kind of dated and cheesy, the underlying message of the hyper-commercial nature of capitalism was a decent compliment to Copyright Criminals.

Takin’ you to school! La journée de la jupe (en: Skirt Day) (2008) and Waiting for Superman (2010)

So I have been way too busy these past couple of weeks to write any entries, but I am back on it since it is spring break and I suppose I can spare (waste) an hour or so to write about some films I’ve seen.

La journée de la jupe (en: Skirt Day) (2008)

Dir. Jean-Paul Lilienfield, 87 min., at a free screening, French with English subtitles

Just as a lead in, I was talking tonight about two different types of education films that are common in our society. In category the first, films where a white teacher starts a job at an “inner city” school (with all of the negative connotations that our society associates with that pejorative term) and the white teacher eventually teaches black and Latino troublemakers that life is oh so much sweeter when you embrace white, middle-class value systems–examples: Freedom Writers (2007), Dangerous Minds (1995). In category the second, films where a beleaguered high school teacher takes brutal revenge on the nogoodnik students by transgressing the boundaries of a professional educator, mainly in the form of hitting, intimidating, and even killing the students–examples: One Eight Seven (1997), The Substitute (1996).

Skirt Day is a little from category one and a little from category two, minus the stupidness. In fact, the only comparison between the former films and the later is that Skirt Day highlights how smart films can be that cover the tightly intertwined factors of societal and classroom tensions. Skirt Day, as one of my friends at the screening said, could take place in any country because of the universal nature of the problems that students, teachers, and administrators face: problems of racial tensions, misogyny, classroom and street gang violence, gun control, teacher burnout, administrative unresponsiveness, etc. etc.

Sonia (Isabelle Adjani), an overworked and unappreciated teacher, receives no respect from the foul-mouthed students in her drama class. While students are harassing the poor volunteers who actually try to participate, Sonia notices two students acting suspiciously in the back of the classroom. She approaches them and confiscates Mouss’ (Yann Ebonge) backpack, and in the struggle a handgun falls to the floor, which Sonia picks up. Mouss tries to wrest the gun away, a shot goes off, and Sonia ends up as a hostage taker, simultaneously teaching a class on Molière at gunpoint while negotiating to voice her grievances with the teaching system and the rampant misogyny and violence afforded female teachers and students in her school.

Our guest speaker, a student from France who prepared an excellent discussion session, talked about some of the cultural values and ideas that this film seeks to comment on, including the sensitive nature of immigration, the concentration of poverty in Parisian suburbs, and also some positives about the French education system as well (including their strict adherence to the separation of church and state).

For anyone who is an educator or has volunteered in schools (especially in Chicago), you might be very familiar with some of the challenges and frustrations the anti-hero Sonia faces in this film. There was some commentary on whether the situations portrayed in the film (e.g. vulgar language, classroom violence, screaming arguments between teacher and student) are commonplace or artistic license, amplified to drive home a point. For anyone who has been in CPS and seen not just the triumphs, but also the grinding reality of the daily force-of-will showdowns between students, teachers, and administrators, this film is an education in how public schooling truly is a difficult and consuming endeavor, and how a school environment free of such distractions and dangers is a blessing to those fortunate to experience it, not, as our society sometimes likes to believe, a public guarantee for all. 
9/10

Waiting for Superman (2010)

Dir. Davis Guggenheim, 111 min.

In yet another in a string of slick documentaries targeted for moviegoers who feel just enough compulsion to try to learn something, but lacking the fortitude to sit through a documentary film that doesn’t have lots of animation segues, Waiting for Superman will tell you about the problems in our education system.

I’m not going to once again open up the “what makes a documentary film work” can of worms, but this film doesn’t have it. That’s not to say that there is not a lot of great stuff buried in this film.

Here’s what works: interviews with innovative educators who are trying new things like Geoffrey Canada and Michelle Rhee. Narratives of students and parents struggling to obtain a good education, in their own words.

Here’s what doesn’t: bossy voiceovers accompanied by what amounts to cutesy educational cartoons, cramming meaningless statistics and visualizations down our throat. Here’s a stat: 60 percent of the time, 100 percent of your audience either isn’t paying attention or knows enough about rudimentary descriptive statistics to know that your stats are garbage filler designed to fog up the mind of the viewer. Just leave the infographics at home please.

Still, the interesting discussion about educational reform, societal factors that impact childhood education (which is everything), and a different take on teachers unions (which is no doubt very unpopular right now) make this film worth seeing. I won’t get into my union opinions, but there are negative sides that deserve exploration, and this film gives a somewhat unbiased platform for those issues.

I meant to write about this film a couple of weeks ago when I saw it, but totally forgot. However, I remember enjoying it quite a bit and thinking that it was worth the spot in my Netflix cue.
7/10

That’s all for this week friends.  I will hopefully be writing at least two or three more times this semester, but who can say…

Oscar Nominated Film Roundup (Part One?)

So I am going to try to watch as many Oscar nominated films as possible before the big day two weeks from now. Who knows what the future will bring in terms of my schedule, however, so I may not get to blog about it. If all goes well, I will be able to write at least one more post which will mean I’ve had time to watch at least one or two more films before the big night.

The King’s Speech (2010)

Dir. Tom Hooper, 121 min., in theaters

Hooper is not stranger to period pieces, directing two period television series that involve the personal trials and tribulations of great men and women of history. I was fortunate to catch a bit of Terry Gross’ interview with Tom Hooper and it may have biased my viewing of the film since Colin Firth’s (King George VI, “Bertie”) method approach to embodying the character and speech manner of George VI was fascinating. The big buzz in method acting this year centered around Natalie Portman in Black Swan and Christian Bale in The Fighter, but Firth deserves at least as much if not more credit for his performance in this film.

In a nutshell, George VI (Firth) becomes king of England in the period leading up to WWII after his self-absorbed and definitively un-Royal brother Edward VIII (Guy Pierce) abdicates to marry a divorcee. George’s wife, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) arranges the help of a speech therapist, Lionel Louge (Geoffrey Rush) to help remedy George’s debilitating stammer which prevents him from confidently performing his functions as the figurehead of British society.

The film benefits from an inspiring real life story, and the storytelling within the film keeps a brisk pace and lends a dire gravity to what would ordinarily be yet another Oscar-bait, palace intrigue story. Rush was much maligned for chewing up the scenery in this film, but I found his performance to be within the bounds of the character, whose flamboyant therapeutic methods were a perfect match for the actor. Touching moments abounded throughout, and I found myself genuinely in suspense of the outcome and desperately rooting for his success.

An additional bonus was the gorgeous cinematography. Most every shot was a visual treat. This would ordinarily strike me as a film that need not be seen in theaters, but viewing this film at home will not do it justice. In a bit of cinematic irony, we see characters in the film spacing themselves out from microphones only to have the camera bossily push its way into the faces of Firth and Rush. Dividing the screen into thirds, the film presents close ups that juxtapose visually intriguing patterned backdrops with Firth’s (and Rush’s) pained facial expressions.  One of my favorite releases of 2010.

9/10

The Social Network (2010)

Dir. David Fincher, 120 min., on DVD

Two things: First, just because it’s about Facebook doesn’t mean it will be interesting or that I’ll care. Second, no one talks like this in real life.

Going from a touching rendition of one man’s brutally difficult struggle to be heard to a Aaron Sorkin script hardly seems fair to this film, but life isn’t usually fair, as the characters of The Social Network find out.

If you have to explain to me why I should believe that the dialogue you’re presenting to me is believable as human intelligible speech then perhaps it needs to be toned down (“Having a conversation with you is exhausting. It’s like dating a stairmaster”–just one instance of many awkwardly explanatory lines).   If Sorkin has tried to prove one thing with his writing, it’s that people hash out ideas in fast-paced, borderline maniacal speech sprints that shove rapid-fire witty retorts down your throat. Putting my dislike of Sorkin’s view of the world aside (if I can), the film still was a disappointment to me, perhaps due to excessive buildup.

The Social Network is less the story of Facebook and more the story of Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), and the film really struggles to come to some conclusions about his character. The events that happen throughout the course of the film were mostly window dressing for a character analysis of, as the film’s closing captions tell us, the world’s youngest billionaire. As such, everything has to be extreme: extreme work sessions, extreme Harvard snobbery, extreme coincidences (Zuckerberg happens to move in next door to Sean Parker, Napster creator played well by Justin Timberlake) and, of course, extreme partying (a zip line from the chimney into the pool, really? It’s like a Mountain Dew commercial, a beverage which was product placed right into the movie, EXTREEEEEMMMMEEEEE DUDE!).

In a very non-critical appraisal, I just wasn’t feeling the film. I again admit that I dislike Sorkin’s unique style of writing, but that wasn’t the only thing bothering me. Most of the reviews I read/heard were praising this film for making a deposition interesting, but it just wasn’t. The two depositions could have been struck from the film for all I care, as the storyline proceeded in chronological order anyway and didn’t need any added layers of commentary telling me when to feel what. Why were they included? I guess for more Zuckerberg character development.

Was the timing right for a biopic of Zuckerberg either? Where is this source material coming from? Like the litigators in the film, is someone picking through the Harvard Crimson for this stuff? There were a lot of wasted opportunities for commentary on the ways that Facebook has changed our lives (with the notable exception of a great relationship status message bit). This film was less a study of the triumph of a megalithic social networking site than a character study on why Mark Zuckerberg is an ass (with one lawyer at the end regrettably spelling it all out for us: “You’re not an asshole…you’re just trying to so hard to be one”). I don’t know many billionaires, but I’m guessing that being an ass is par for the course, and I didn’t need a two hour lesson in why that’s the case.

6/10

 
Restrepo (2010)

Dirs. Tim Hetherington, Sebastian Junger, 93 min. (unofficial), on Netflix Instant

In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien writes that “a true war story isn’t moral.” Hetherington and Junger’s Restrepo tries to buck that trend by interjecting a lot of sentimentality and positive story trajectories into their film. However, as a documentary, whose to say that isn’t the way the story went?

Firstly, the only way you can really review a film like this and criticize the artistic merits of the film is to first separate the subject from the presentation. There’s no shortage of respect for the sacrifice of armed service members here, which is really the only way you can tell the story. However, along with an accurate representation of modern warfare and the struggles that our soldiers face fighting in Afghanistan, there are some disturbing undertones of how the story is presented.

This film comes off like a gnomon, leaving me with a sense that something more profound is missing from the presentation; perhaps out of respect for the sacrifices made by the soldiers, or perhaps to mitigate the senselessness of war. In either case, the filmmakers do themselves no favors by holding back. Surely the brutality of war is well represented in the film, but the sanctimonious justifications of the soldiers is not, as one would expect, thrown into sharp relief with the hopelessness of their fight. It seems like everything the soldiers in this film built will fall apart, but the film tries to go out on a high note, which I felt was undeserved given the climate surrounding the Afghanistan war this year.

I’m not sure my full attention was arrested by this film either. In terms of subject matter, the film comes off as disorganized and thrown together (dates might have been helpful in laying out the storyline). Perhaps this was a commentary on disorganized nature of human conflict and war.

However, the film ultimately redeems itself in the raw footage that the intrepid filmmakers were able to capture and put together. Funded by Nat Geo, this film (as in all of their projects) has a “being there” quality that makes it worth the experience. As a closing thought, this really is an experiential documentary, focusing on putting you in the shoes of the subjects and leaving the explication of the issues for post-viewing homework.

6/10

Ip Man (2008)

Dir. Wilson Yip, 106 min., on Netflix Instant

Ip Man tells the story of a Chinese martial arts master, and not the inventor of the Internet Protocol as I was let to believe.

Wow, rereading that first sentence, I sound like a Groupon ad copy writer. All stupidness aside, the film is about a martial artist before and during the Japanese occupation of China during World War II. Ip Man is a master of the fighting style known as Wing Chung (must fight Groupon style joke…argh…can’t hold back…as opposed to WANG CHUNG, GET IT, HAW HAW HAW HAW).

At first Ip Man (Donnie Yen) just enjoys the occasional bout with locals, but he eventually starts beating on a traveling group of renegade martial artists that roll into town and defeat every other skilled fighter. That whole sequence is essentially the first half of the film.

Once the Japanese show up, they start pitting soldiers (I assume they’re soldiers–it’s never fully explained) against former martial arts masters in town to prove once and for all that Japanese fighting styles are superior. There’s some buildup over the course of an hour or so, and a subplot that briefly reintroduces some pre-occupation characters, but most of it is window dressing for the final fight between Ip Man and the Japanese general.

In general, the martial arts in the film come off slightly fantastical. I like fighting films, but they are by no means my favorite type of film, so I can’t speak with too much authority on historical conventions. I know that samurai films typically have a fantastical element that has something to do with Japanese folklore, but in my experience, fighting films that focus on one particular style tend to be grounded in reality (the very notable exception I can recall is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)). This film doesn’t so much break the laws of physics as bend them in inexplicable ways: no one is flying from rooftop to rooftop, but there are several Matrix moments in the fight sequences.

The film is semi-biographical, which is a polite euphemism for lightly fictionalized, and what I like to call partially stuffed full of crap that attempts to make it more interesting and condense a person’s life history into a contiguous chain of events. Categorizations like that are always worthless anyway, as the film could have been 100% fictional and still worked just as well for anyone who didn’t know anything about this man’s life, a set of persons of which I am a part. If the film really was semi-biographical, the director might have eliminated one subplot which does practically nothing in terms of character development and spends 20 or so minutes as a setup for the film’s conclusion (if you watch or have watched the film, I am talking about the factory subplot).

Weak pacing really sabotages what would otherwise be a perfectly enjoyable film. This film reminded me a great deal of Fearless (2006), which was supposedly Jet Li’s final martial arts film, unless you count the seven he has made since then. The pacing in Fearless was superior in that the story had a superstructure that enabled the viewer to anticipate the redemptive arc. It’s backdrop as a semi-biographical also worked better in my opinion; this may have had to do with superior character development for the non titular character (which paradoxically leads to better development of the film’s subject).

In closing, the real test as I see it for a biopic is did I feel like I learned who the man or woman was by the end. In this case, I don’t feel like I understand any more about Ip Man than I could have gleaned from a quick scan of his Wikipedia page.

5/10

The Rite (2011)

Dir. Mikael Håfström, 112 min., in theaters now

After missing out on a week or more of watching new films, I’m back to review a film I had little interest in seeing, The Rite. One would have expected a film dealing with demonic possession and exorcism to have a myriad of potently disturbing visual imagery sufficient to fill at least two hours, but director Mikael Håfström comes up with practically nothing. One of his prior films, 1408 (2007) captured the phantasmagorical spectrum of eternal damnation in a hotel room that is a convergence of malevolent spirits–or as Samuel L. Jackson’s character puts it, “an evil f&^%ing room.”

The Rite, on the other hand, reads more like a watered down version of The Exorcist (1973), and I would recommend you watch that film instead. Anthony Hopkins gives the film’s best performance, but that isn’t totally surprising given that the other characters in the film are not given very much to do.

When priest in training Michael Kovac (Colin O’Donoghue) goes to Rome to take part in a course that teaches him how to conduct a proper exorcism (and by extension, extinguish his religious skepticism) he meets with Hopkins’ exorcist priest. There’s some religious themed debate between the principle characters on whether exorcism is nothing but an antiquated custom that harms mentally ill persons by preventing intervention by the psychiatric community; but like a bad Law and Order episode, the discussions are just factoid-esque talking points from a USA Today infographic that are wadded up and forced into actors mouths to be regurgitated at regular intervals. Chances are, you’ve already had a more meaningful discussion on the topic in your head while waiting in line for tickets.

In terms of bringing the scary, apart from the occasional jump scene (including the ubiquitous cat-jumping-out-and-snarling) there is not much to speak of, except for a red-eyed demon mule. Keith Phipps, in his review downplays the role of the demon mule too much. If you’re watching this film for nothing else, the demon mule is pretty badass. However, you might be disappointed when the mule just stands there and does nothing, especially after the little boy who it has been terrorizing builds the demon mule up with a story about how it’s kicking and biting him in his dreams.

The exorcism scenes themselves are spaced much too far apart, meaning we have plenty in the way of boring exposition which bloats the run time well past where it needed to be. Rome, with it’s old buildings and narrow streets, could not have looked less scary. The cinematography in this film is a flop, with shots that should be unnerving or strange falling flat on their collective face. The most laughable sequence is in a futuristic situation room where a Vatican priest is operating a high-tech touch screen interface. It was like DiVinci Code meets Transformers.

In my entry on The Fighter I talked about how boxing films are inevitably compared to Rocky, and I would argue that no exorcism film can be discussed without thinking about The Exorcist. There is one cast off line by Hopkins’ character which answers the obvious question “How can the characters exist in this world and believably pretend not to know about this film?”, but this film doesn’t really do anything new for the exorcism subgenre of horror.

By far the most shocking part of this film is that in the course of writing this review, I’ve discovered that this film has the lowest rating (17%) on RT of any film I have ever written about on this blog. Seeing as I have reviewed gems like The Condemned and Pet Sematary II, I am genuinely stunned. While The Rite is certainly not worth all of the critical badmouthing it received, it’s not really worth sitting through either.

5/10